Still serving
This is the best moment you will ever have to prepare
If you are in TAP or more than six months out, you are standing in the one window where your records are still being created and you can still walk in and ask for them. Almost nobody uses it.
Why the timing matters this much
Everything gets harder on your separation date
Records are still being created
Anything you report to medical now becomes contemporaneous evidence. That is the strongest kind there is, and the window closes on your separation date.
Access is easiest right now
You can walk into medical. You can request your file. Every one of those steps gets slower and more bureaucratic after you leave.
Witnesses are still nearby
The people who can describe what you went through are in the same building. In three years they are spread across the country.
What to do while you are still in
Four things, in rough order of value
Go to medical for the things you have been ignoring
The knee you have walked on for six years. The ringing you stopped noticing. If it is not in your service treatment records, proving it started in service gets dramatically harder the day you separate.
Request a full copy of your own records
Ask for your service treatment records and your personnel file while you are still in and the request is routine. After separation the same request goes through a records centre and takes considerably longer.
Write down what nobody wrote down
The exposures, the incidents, the symptoms that never made it to sick call. Dates, units, locations, who else was there. You will not remember it as clearly in five years, and this becomes the backbone of a lay statement.
Collect names before everyone scatters
The people who shared your barracks, your vehicle, your section. A buddy statement is often the only evidence that a symptom started in service, and it is far easier to get a contact detail now than to find someone in a decade.
Preparing is not filing
You can build the file long before you can submit it
Nothing about gathering records, documenting symptoms or collecting witness details commits you to filing anything. It just means that when you become eligible, your file is already strong instead of already thin.
Run the analysis on what you have now. It will tell you which evidence elements your records already cover for the conditions you are thinking about, and which ones you still have time to fix from the inside.
The one sentence version
Everything you document today is contemporaneous evidence. Everything you remember later is a recollection.
VA weighs those two things very differently, and no amount of later effort converts one into the other.
Common questions
Preparing while still in
Next step
Start building the file now
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